


my north, my south, my east and west;

by casualbird



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Found Family, M/M, major character death in that uvo is a main character in this fic anyway, rated for implied sexual content and spider imagery, which is a really fun thing to get to say, wow this is really gay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-09
Updated: 2020-09-09
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:08:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26368474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/casualbird/pseuds/casualbird
Summary: The spider’s legs curled in on itself, always ragged, half-dead, cleaving.He’d never felt that quite so much as when he’d fight back to back with Uvo. Or when they’d flex their old-married-couplitude with a bicker or raucous spar; when they would try, though Nobunaga always knew it was hopeless, to drink or arm-wrestle each other under the table.Thoughts on love, solidarity, and swordplay.
Relationships: Nobunaga Hazama/Uvogin | Ubogin
Comments: 6
Kudos: 15





	my north, my south, my east and west;

**Author's Note:**

> i looked everywhere and could not find one single nobunaga character study. be the fanfiction you wish to see in the world.

No student of Nen ever mastered it without ending up at some sticking point, splayed over a stumbling block. Something that felt too simple to be so hard, something they _knew_ they’d look a fool in retrospect for not understanding, something that nonetheless couldn’t be brute-forced.

For Nobunaga, it was the sword. Not that he ought to have one--no, his hatsu was the simplest concept of all his friends’, cut and dried from the first. Rather it was… making the sword into a part of himself, absorbing it into his aura.

Swordmasters would always tell you, conceive of the blade as an extension of your arm. Nobunaga knew this like he knew how to blink, and still--nothing. His aura wobbled and guttered, every time, at the pommel.

It needed to be _innate,_ marrow-deep. Merged, the sharpest bone in the body, a second spine.

He couldn’t just will it to be. The exercises he’d come up with, too, were over-literal and fruitless.

Looking back, it took him far too long to parse that the sword simply had to be like the nascent Phantom Troupe. Not _all his,_ but a greater organism, the spider of which he was one leg. Dividing it further, a spider’s leg is jointed, segmented. Each piece of it moved by the same force, each reaching for some universal goal. His sword to his body to the spider, claw to tarsus to thorax. All articulated, slicing toward survival.

If not, there’d be no life, and little point in living it. Meteor City wasn’t a broken place--it’d never been _whole,_ even after wretched centuries spent cobbling it together. If there were words to describe that cutthroat squalor, Nobunaga certainly didn’t have the education to know what they were.

So. The spider’s legs curled in on itself, always ragged, half-dead, cleaving.

He’d never felt that quite so much as when he’d fight back to back with Uvo. Or when they’d flex their old-married-couplitude with a bicker or raucous spar; when they would try, though Nobunaga always knew it was hopeless, to drink or arm-wrestle each other under the table.

He’d never felt so _tethered,_ tied so safely down and in, as he did with that huge hand clapped hard across his back, that migraine din of laughter in his ear. With Uvo squaring up beside him, smiling mother-bear beastly. _With_ him, when they’d finagle time alone, twining breathlessly together, and after, when they’d lie without laughing, with no use for voiced language at all.

So. Leg to spider, sword to arm. It was inexorable, inextricable, innate.

All of them--at least the ones who were there at the beginning--thought they’d live and die like that. That whatever was tough enough for one of them was for all of them, that they’d all shudder out at once. The spider, crushed under the sole of some goliath shoe.

They didn’t, and… Nobunaga doesn’t remember much, from the days after that. Blurred, chaotic images, all viewed through sleepless eyes--they trashed the auction like a funeral procession, just… splintered. Raw, no pall, no black veneer, no lace veils. Afterward, there wasn’t time. He threw his whole being on the grindstone, to find that--that fucking--and only ended up weeping, dripping onto a crumble of concrete, in front of what might as well have been every eye on earth. Even so, by then, there was nothing left to spare for petty nonsense like embarrassment, machismo.

And still, somehow, like the karma he’d always discounted--it just kept coming, just kept getting _worse._

There was that thing they’d always said--that a spider can keep living, keep fighting, even if it’s lost a leg. And it was heartening, really, something to bring into oneself, but… it never said anything of the way the spider’d feel the empty space.

**Author's Note:**

> stan nobunaga
> 
> or don't, but i'm just getting back to writing in this fandom--and this isn't exactly a popular ship--so i'd be obliged if you let me know what you thought of this. plus, come hang out with me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/bird_scribbles) if you like, so long as you're of age.
> 
> title is from wh auden's funeral blues. i'm so proud of this title that suddenly my entire english degree is worth it.


End file.
